


Puzzle Cube

by sunlight_flight



Category: The Yogscast
Genre: Gen, all the feels, it's time to save the world, off to adventure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-28
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-14 02:41:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1249747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunlight_flight/pseuds/sunlight_flight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ridge kidnaps Xephos and Honeydew for another adventure, and Xephos is sick of being entertainment. But there's more to this one than he realizes. </p><p>Set during the Puzzle Cube adventure, obvs.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Demigod Puzzle Solving

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Would you like to play a game?](https://archiveofourown.org/works/758355) by [Entomancy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Entomancy/pseuds/Entomancy). 



A demigod doesn't say please. He also doesn't say _Excuse me,_ or _Do you mind,_ or _Sorry to bother you,_ and especially not _You look like you're in the middle of a highly critical experiment, perhaps I should come back later?_

No, when a demigod appears, plucks you by the collar and kidnaps you for his own purpose, what he says is, "Yoink!" 

Xephos glared at the grinning Ridgedog, who was bouncing on his toes with his usual demented energy. He was impeccably dressed, as always, in his brocade coat with gleaming golden buttons and a pristine white ruffled shirt, over tan jodhpurs and soft leather boots. One perfect curl of hair bobbed on his forehead in time with the bouncing. "Oh for ff—not again. I don't have time for this." 

"Whoops, forgot something." The demigod winked out, and before Xephos could do more than put his hands on his hips, the dark-eyed god was back, holding onto the bandolier of a very dusty dwarf, who in turn was holding a pickaxe raised over his head. 

"Wot," Honeydew said, lowering the pickaxe and looking about, and then "Oh. You," when he spotted Ridgedog. He hoisted the pickaxe over one shoulder, nodded to Xephos, and then leaned casually to one side, idly shaking the dust out of his long ginger beard and looking utterly unsurprised. Between this non-reaction and the jittering Ridgedog, Xephos couldn't decide which pissed him off more. No, he decided, it was perfectly decidable.

"This is the third time in two weeks. I'm not your goddamn hobbyhorse to ride whenever you're bored. I have things to do that don't involve you and whatever…whatever _this_ is." He waved a hand at their immediate surroundings, which appeared to be a English garden in a hedge maze, complete with a small white gazebo. He paused, momentarily distracted by the tranquil setting. "What _is_ this, anyways?"

Ridge spread his arms expansively and twirled, his coat billowing out in a graceful swirl. "It's fun, Xeph. See, it's been so long, you don't even recognize it."

Xephos folded his arms and refused to be distracted. "I mean it. You pulled me out of something…"

"…not important. This is important. And fun. You need fun, Xeph, you'll get frowny wrinkles from all that frowning." He mimicked Xephos' folded arms and pulled an exaggerated grimace, which got a hastily stifled snort from the dwarf. "See? Honeydew's with me. Knew I could count on you, buddy." 

Xephos made a strangled noise. "Why do you bring us to these places? They're all so random. Last time we were looking for a lost potato, of all things, and the time before that, it was that bizarre dungeon that created itself. It's like they're toy worlds created by idiot—" he clipped the word _gods_ at the last moment— "children. Why us? Why _this_?" This last word came out in a plaintive moan. 

The demigod sauntered forward until they were almost nose-to-nose, and Xephos caught the scent of him: smoke and electricity and something else, something richer and darker and at once both sinister and thrilling. The scent of magic. The mocking smile disappeared, replaced with a rakish grin. 

"Xeph, you know I can't stay away from you. I'm a man with needs, you know that." He turned his head to one side and cocked an eyebrow. 

The small white-hot spark of anger that had been smoldering in Xephos' chest flared, as if the mockery was the last straw that fueled the anger into a blazing fury. He poked a finger at Ridge's chest, being very careful not to touch him. 

"You know what? I'm done with this, and I'm done with you. Take us back. Now." 

The demigod's smile froze on his face, and then grew broader, spreading like a stain into something wolfish and hungry. Xephos recoiled; he'd never known Ridge to be malicious, but he was not exactly tame, either. The demigod reached up and gently ran a thumb along the beard Xephos had neatly trimmed that morning, and the wolfish grin faded into something older, sadder, and tired. "I'm sorry," he said, softly, "I need your help." After a moment, he added, "Please?" 

 Xephos found he had a new working definition of "utterly terrifying". He had often wished, openly and loudly, to be asked before Ridge took him on one of these adventures, but now that he had, he found it deeply unsettling. What help could he possibly give a god? He looked into Ridge's uncharacteristically stony face, and caught a glimpse of something flickering in the dark and glittering eyes; he tried to follow it, but it hooked him instead and pulled him down, engulfing him and washing away everything into inky nothing. And then he saw. 

A horde, a vast, dark horde of seething and chittering that stretched endlessly across the borders of existence. They were like cockroaches—no, not cockroaches, termites, because a vast hunger drove them; they bore into the universes they came across and cracked them open like marrowbones; they ate and they ate, and they were never full. He felt a high and lonely fear; they were unstoppable, these creatures, voracious and mindless, and they would obliterate everything he knew or cared about without ever knowing what they did. No, that wasn't right. They ate knowledge as well as matter, and they used it to evolve and learn, and in turn, they learned to seek out the occupied places to find more knowledge, and then he realized in horror they were not mindless at all, not any more. They were aware. They were aware of _him_ — 

Something hit Xephos hard in the back; after a disorienting moment he realized it was the ground.  As he looked up into the cloudless blue sky, Ridge leaned over him and smiled as if nothing had happened. Honeydew leaned over, too, curious.

It took a few tries for words to come out. "Wha…what…that?"

The demigod looked around at the pastoral setting and inhaled the floral scent deeply and with pleasure. "Somewhere here is an thing. An important thing. I require it." He paused and looked down at Xephos. "Please," he said again, and smacked his lips as if the word tasted funny.

Xephos tried to scramble to his feet but his limbs weren't working correctly. "Ridge, what is this? What's going on? _What did I see?_ " 

Ridge snapped his fingers. "I almost forgot! Your present." A small box wrapped in shimmery pink paper and a white satin bow appeared in his hands. "Be good and share." He handed it to Honeydew, who immediately turned it over and got coal-black all over it. 

"Don't you dare show me the goddamn apocalypse and then vanish on me. Tell me what's going on!" 

Ridge grinned as he slowly vanished, the grin disappearing last of all.

Xephos swore and kicked a perfectly innocent daisy in the face. 


	2. Roses and Thorns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Is being a hero something you are, or something you do?

_On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux._  
One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

\-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _The Little Prince_

Carnival games were not Xephos' favorite way of handling imminent doom. He wasn't sure he had a favorite way, but if he did, this was definitely not it. It was, however, a surprisingly good way of handling abandonment by one's god. He hefted a gold bar, pictured Ridge's smirking face on it and hurled it down the track, where it bounced along with a metallic clang and then a loud _thwack_ as it hit the far wall.  

This was an odd place, even by Ridgedog rat maze standards. They were on a miniature world, covered in gardens and hedges, small enough to circumnavigate in a few minutes. The white gazebo they'd appeared next to had a thick glass floor covering a chest, and on the outside there were four power lines running to the nearby faces, each with their own puzzle. This part was obvious enough: solve the puzzles, get the chest. The sixth face had no structure at all, only a wild garden with a small grassy mound in the center. That was less obvious, and it worried him. 

He was missing something, he had to be. Ridge said he needed help, but Xephos was doing nothing the demigod couldn't do. It didn't make sense. Ridge was capricious, but he wasn't a liar. Or was he? That thought ran around and around in his head and he rubbed his forehead and wished to be somewhere else, doing anything else. Running an experiment. Sitting on a beach. Doing his taxes. 

Not that he paid any, but still. It was the principle of the thing.

He half-heartedly lobbed another golden block down the track. This puzzle, if you could call it that, was a low, narrow structure with a glass roof and wooden floor; sealed on all sides except for an arm-sized hole in one wall that you flung gold bricks into and bounced them down a track into three pockets. Gold bricks were an odd choice, considering they were one of the least bouncy items he knew, but he'd determined that whoever made this was an idiot after a button on the structure caused bricks to rain from the sky like a biblical plague: the first time, both of them were caught by surprise and nearly brained. 

He pictured the architect on the next brick, and went to throw it, but it slipped out of his hands and came to a unsatisfactory, rolling stop in the middle of the track. 

Honeydew, who was too short to reach the arm-sized hole, was sitting on the grass, holding a gold block up like a compact while picking silt out of his teeth with a thumbnail. At least the dwarf wasn't hocking up great sandy gobs of the stuff like he used to. After a particularly egregious incident involving his office and a paper target of himself, he'd asked R&D to _dear God please_ take that habit out of the clone template.

"You done making yourself pretty there, princess?" Xephos said, mildly.

The dwarf looked up and quirked an eyebrow, uncowed. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Xephos. It's my purpose in life, to be a joy." But he heaved himself to his feet good-naturedly and stood and watched as Xephos bounced the next brick down the track. This one was closer: two inches to the left and he'd've gotten it.

The dwarf patted his shoulder with a filthy hand. "I believe in you," he said. "You just have to believe in yourself." His eyes shone, earnestly.

Xephos smacked him in the shoulder. "Oh, stop it." The dwarf chuckled.

He lined up to make another throw. What was he missing? The question drummed at him over and over, beating at him. He couldn't think with that memory pressing on him, and, as if summoned, the vision bloomed again, unbidden, lush and dreamlike; an endless sea of hunger and greed; teeth that gutted existence itself and sucked out the innards; always hunting and never sleeping, and that final horror of a hundred billion eyes turning on him. He shuddered and dropped the brick. Sitting down on the grass, he put his head between his knees. 

He heard the dwarf sit down beside him. "He's just havin' a bit of fun with ye, mate. Like he does. Don't let him twist your knickers." 

Xephos shook his head, not looking up. "No. He's not. It's not okay. Nail that into your dwarven skull."

Honeydew patted him on the arm, kindly this time. "Look, we'll find the thing Ridge wants, hand it over, he'll waggle his magic hands, bish bosh, Bob's your uncle, the day is saved."  There was a pause. "You rest there, let me climb up top and watch you throw. Maybe give you pointers, alright?" 

Xephos didn't look up as the dwarf tottered off, still trembling with the aftereffects of the vision. Maybe he was fretting too much; Ridge, for all his madding faults, looked out for his own and if he made a promise, he kept it. You just had to be sure what the promise was. Except…he hadn't made any promises, had he? Only demanded, then asked, then bribed. He looked over at the untouched gift from Ridge lying beside him in the grass, and felt the slow burn of anger all over again. He would not be bought off with fripperies like a schoolgirl.

God, he was tired. Between running the labs and the global businesses, the meetings and planning committees, staying up late pouring over budgets and legal documents, drumming up new contracts and trying to keep on top of it all, he'd been running himself hard lately. On a good day, he reveled in it, enjoyed the science and the secrecy and the game; the fast-paced negotiation; the busy hum of factory floor robotics; the fun of surprise inspections and watching people snap to attention as he walked by. On a bad day, though…there was nothing like walking through a facility of thousands, all eyes on him, and feeling utterly alone. On those days he holed up in his office and drank. 

He had enough problems worrying about himself and his friends; why, oh why, did he have to worry about the universe, too? Surely it was big enough to take care of itself.

Oh hell, as long as he was wading into the self-pity mire, he didn't worry about his friends much these days, because he barely saw them. They all had their own lives and projects, and he had his. Honeydew was there, of course, but that felt less like companionship sometimes and more like owning a pet dragon with a penchant for murder and high explosives. The line item for "Honeydew, clone replacement, maintenance, and disaster recovery" had completely overrun the budget this year, and he'd been forced to make the call to R&D, who, thank God, had gotten it under control. There's only so many times a man is willing to rebuild his laboratory, no matter how close the friendship.

And then chaos personified himself showed up with a _Hello darling!_ and turned everything on its ear. It was maddening, like the universe itself conspired to never let him have any peace. If that was so, maybe it deserved what was coming to it.

_I want somebody else to save it this time._

He took a deep, steadying breath, inhaling the scent of the flowers and taking in the warmth. There was a public garden much like this near his childhood home; in the summers his nan visited and took her daily walk there among the roses and the hedges. His parents sent him along for company, ostensibly so she didn't get lost, although she knew the way perfectly well. (He suspected different motivations now that he was older.) But he didn't mind, either then or now, because his nan endlessly indulged his drive to know: as a boy he ran back and forth pointing at this plant and that, and she knew them all and named them for him. _Ah, that's a Portland rose, they have the most beautiful fragrance, see?_ Or _That's a creeping thistle, that is. Nasty plant, gets everywhere if you let it._

As he got older, they talked about other things. After his first nasty breakup, she sat on a bench and listened, listened as if nothing else in the world mattered more the heartbroken sobbing of a teenage boy. And then embraced him like he was eight instead of eighteen. 

_Love is a hard thing, sweet pea. A very hard thing._

The boy on the bench belatedly realized his grandfather had died many years ago, and looked up at her in tears. _How can you stand it?_

She didn't answer for a minute. _It's a brave thing, to love another. We all get hurt, sweet pea._ She stroked his hair.  _There's no remedy for this, only time. You simply go on. The important thing is to be strong, and to love others like yourself; nothing more, nothing less. There's no other truth than that._

She had buried a husband and one of her sons, and still found space for that small curious boy and the overly serious young man. Never complained, never told him no, never made him feel unwelcome or a trouble. And he had never appreciated what a gift it had been, until now.

One corner of Xephos's mouth turned up. He was a idiot. A blithering idiot. He could whine and mope about his burdens, or pick them up and go on until he could put them down. _I ask not for a lighter burden, but for broader shoulders._ Heroism was a form of love, wasn't it? You had to love the world to want to save it. 

"Oi! We getting on with this or what?" Honeydew stood on the glass roof, looking down at him and grinning, his dirty dwarven toes on the edge sprouting with glistening ginger hairs. "The world ain't going to save itself." He put his hands on his hips and posed like Superman.

Xephos laughed, and it felt good. Dwarf and man, they would save the world together. Again. And Ridgedog would forgive him, or more likely, pretend it never happened. And the lab…well, it needed some work done, anyway. A bit of premature demolition wouldn't hurt.

There was nothing for it but to go on. He picked himself up, hefted another gold brick and let it fly.

 

* * *

 

To no one's surprise, the glass floor vanished once they'd completed the last task.

They squatted next to the hole and peered in: the chest was about four feet below the floor, too far to reach. Xephos jumped in beside it, eagerly…and went right through the floor, the image of the chest rippling like water. He fell for a long, sickening moment and then gravity reasserted itself, pulling him sideways and he landed hard on a wooden floor.  A few seconds later, Honeydew dropped next to him with a jarring thump. 

Staggering to his feet, he saw, to his growing dismay, that they were on a miniature world made of wood, with a familiar wooden gazebo with a glass floor covering a vault with a chest, and four power lines leading off to four faces. No sky, but a enormous wooden dome lit with flickering torches. 

* * *

The dwarf rested his eyes and waited for the shouting to stop. It would, eventually, he just had to be patient.


	3. Hand of Glory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Xephos and Honeydew find the very important thing Ridge told them about. But where is the demigod?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: I'm new to tagging. Something creepy happens, but there's no gore or anything like that. If you have suggestions, please let me know.
> 
> Also, I use a bit of Entomancy's [Questionable Mortality](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1052611) but in my universe, they aren't as intimate as they are there.

Xephos had lost all track of time. 

He and Honeydew could have been tramping through this pit for hours, or days, or even weeks, for all he could tell. He pictured them emerging, blinking, into a barren wasteland; transported centuries into the future like apocalyptic Rip van Winkles. _Nah. We'd probably've been eaten by space bugs long before that._

He considered the life choices that had led to that statement. 

But that wasn't important. It'd taken them three worlds to get here, to this last one. It looked like a room, but Honeydew had figured out you could run up the walls and stand on the ceiling as easily as the floor, and then wanted to have conversations that way, and the whole thing was disconcerting and made his head hurt. Xephos wasn't claustrophobic as a rule, but when the entire world was inside out and smaller than his office, he got a little twitchy.

Of course, it also contained the one real puzzle of the whole ordeal, because getting out of there clean and easy would be, well, too clean and easy. There were groups of colored squares on the floors; if you touched a square, it changed the color of itself and all neighboring squares. If you turned them all one color, then a bell chimed and you knew you'd done it right. 

It was hard and annoying and he kept losing track of what they'd tried, and halfway through he'd given up completely and had the dwarf do traditional dwarven cavedancing on the last couple until they were solved. The world stank slightly of sweaty dwarf. 

But it had worked, they were done, the front of the glass case had slid away, and they could go home. Xephos resisted the urge to kick up his heels and do a jig himself. Instead, he reached in the chest and hauled out the artifact. 

"Huh," he said, and the dwarf tilted his head quizzically.  

A white obelisk topped with a gold star did not look like something a demigod would want. It didn't look like something anybody would want. 

"That's it?" the dwarf said. "That's what we're after?"

"Must be," Xephos said, but he had a hard time believing it, too. Turning it over, he found the words WHITE TROPHY embossed on the base. 

Honeydew grunted. "What does Ridge want with a trophy?"

"Maybe he misplaced his Best Supporting Jackass award and needed another." Xephos looked up. "Ridge, we got the thing you wanted." 

There was no response.

"Seriously, we're done. Let us out."

His god did not answer. 

"You have questionable taste in clothing," he called. After a moment, he said, louder, "And Superman rang, he wants his stupid hairstyle back." He paused again. "Look, you smug, peacocking bastard, I've had about enough of this. Come and flippin' get us."

After another long moment, Honeydew said, "Don't think he's coming, lad."

"I don't get it," Xephos said, throwing up his hands. "You can't get rid of him when you _don't_ want him, but when you _do_ …" He sat down, leaned against the glass case, and sighed, pointedly closing his eyes.

Honeydew sat down, too. "Xephos?" he said, after a minute.

"What?"

"What if…what if he can't hear us?"

Xephos didn't open his eyes. "It's Ridge. 'Course he can hear us."

"I know, but…"

"Look, either he can't hear us, or he won't. It's not the former, so it has be the latter. Q.E.D."

"But what if he can't?" the dwarf persisted.

Xephos opened an eye. "Then we're screwed and we're stuck in this pit forever until we starve or get eaten by space bugs. Is that what you wanted to hear?"

"No." The dwarf picked at his toenail, and Xephos suppressed the urge to shout at him about it. "Xephos?"

"What?"

"I know you don't…I think we should open the present."

Xephos groaned and covered his head with his arms. "No. No way. It's some terrible joke he's been waiting to spring for hours and hours. I'd rather sit here and rot." He raised his voice. "I can practically hear you giggling, you sadistic pig."

The dwarf hesitated. "If we give him what he wants, at least we'd get home."

"You're not the one who has to, quote, give him what he wants, unquote."

"Right, but—" the dwarf dug more at the toenail. "I can't see Ridge pranking like this. Not if what you saw were true."

"Oh, he would. He really, really would. Have you met Ridgedog? He's about yea high, big chin, talks a mile a minute? Constantly screws around with people's lives _like it's his goddamn job_?"

There was a long pause after this, and then, "Xephos?"

"What?"

"Please? I think it will help."

First demigods, then dwarves. Everybody was so polite to him all of a sudden. It was seriously pissing him off. 

"Fine. You win. You _both win._ " Xephos reached into his coat pocket. The gift was dented from all the wear and tear of today: the pink paper worn and wrinkled and the ribbon flattened and covered in soot. Ripping the paper away, he found a plain white box with an envelope taped to the front; it had "With All My Love" written across it in a loopy, elegant scrawl and signed with a filagree R. Xephos deliberately ignored it and opened the box instead.

Nestled inside was a remote control, at first glance identical to any television or stereo remote. It even had a battery compartment, with, yes, two AA batteries in it. Ridgeacell brand, because of course it was.

"Cute. The hell is this, Ridge?" 

As he looked closer, two things jumped out at him: first, most of the buttons had been pried out and the holes sealed with an opaque resin; and second, the labels were insane. _Op, Time, Execute_ — now that was ominous — _Weather, Enchant, Kill_ — what was the difference between _Execute_ and _Kill_? He itched to get back to the lab and find out. 

It was easier to catalog what wasn't insane: a zero to nine number pad and a large button in the center labelled, simply, _Home_. That seemed clear enough. Safe, even. 

The dwarf blinked at him, innocently. "If I hear one _I told you_ _so_ , I will have a new rug in my office," Xephos grumbled, but he didn't mean it. "Ready?" he asked, picking up the artifact.

The dwarf held onto him tightly. "Hit it."

The world turned off with a _bwoop_ , and after a moment that went on just a bit too long, there was a _pop_ and they were in bright sunshine, standing in the middle of a beautiful English garden in bloom. A white gazebo stood nearby.

In other words, precisely where they'd started. 

"Oh, brilliant. That's just— _Ow._ Son of a _bitch_." 

The dwarf, who had wandered off a few steps, looked back at him. "You okay, mate?"

"The trophy _bit_ me." Xephos dropped both items onto the grass and examined the stung area. There wasn't any puncture he could see, but his whole palm throbbed badly.

The dwarf looked up at him and a flash of alarm crossed his face. "Maybe you should sit down," he said and he led Xephos over to the gazebo. Instead of fading, the tingling was worsening into a painful prickling that was spreading across his hand and into his wrist. 

"Go fetch the thing," Xephos ordered. "Don't touch the other thing." 

By the time Honeydew was back with the remote, the buzzing had spread to his elbow and was sharper and more acute, like his blood had effervesced. He rocked back and forth, shaking his arm in a futile attempt to ease it.

"What do I do?" the dwarf asked.

"I don't know. Hit buttons. Be useful." It was worsening, fast. Xephos cradled his arm to his chest and rubbed at his skin as the razors in his blood slit their way through his bicep. He was losing track of what was going on.

"Which ones?" the dwarf said. "I don't know what—"

"I don't know! Any of them! Hit any—" Pressure was building in his chest, a iron fist crushing some central core of him. He opened his mouth to yell at the dwarf to _do something_ , and could not, because he could no longer breathe.

It wasn't like he had a fear of dying. Actually, that was a lie. He had a deep, all-encompassing fear of dying, and had worked very hard to eliminate as much risk as possible. With the cloning machine, you got transported back, your mind put into a new clone, and then you only had the walk of shame to pick up all your stuff. Death was a mere inconvenience. In practice, he'd died hundreds of times, from all sorts of things. 

This did not feel like an inconvenience. He writhed, horrified, as he felt something inside him, something alive, something shredding through his core self, and—there was no other word—suckling at it, rooting at some essential part of him, which was torn away and consumed. He wanted out. He wanted that pull that meant transportation back to the lab. It didn't come.  Why wasn't it coming? The horrible feeling of being consumed from the inside out increased, and he began to fragment.

Xephos felt himself pitch forward and the ground hit him in the face as he rolled onto the grass. 

Today was not a good day to die. But it looked like he was going to, anyway. 

_Wait, I haven't—_

And then he was gasping in great quantities of air, shuddering and coughing. He had never before appreciated air to this extent. Lovely stuff. Beautiful. Honeydew carefully rolled him over. 

For the second time that day, Xephos lay on the grass, looking up into a cloudless blue sky. Honeydew leaned over him, his ruddy complexion gone bone white, and then the dwarf did something Xephos had never seen him do: burst into tears.

Xephos lay there for a moment, his vision covered by the dirty ginger hair of a sobbing dwarf. It was like being wuffled by a very hairy pony. "I'm so sorry," the dwarf repeated over and over. "It's all my fault."

Xephos went to pat him on the back and found his arm was limp and nerveless from the shoulder down. 

"Buddy, shh. It's okay. I'm okay. Let me up."

The dwarf sat back on his heels, sniffling, and helped Xephos up. He felt down his cold, listless arm and tried to wiggle his fingers. Nothing. His hand lay in the grass, limp and grey.

"OK, that's…not good. What did you do?" 

The dwarf looked stricken and waved the remote. "I dunno, lad, I hit buttons like you said, until something happened. I don't know. I'm sorry. I didn't know. _I'm so sorry._ " and he started bawling again.

Xephos patted him on the shoulder and made soothing noises, only half listening. His arm felt…wrong, like he'd never had an arm there, like his body had always ended at the shoulder and the thing dangling from it belonged to someone else. He realized he couldn't remember what it had felt like to have two arms. That part of him was gone. _Or eaten. Oh God._ He shuddered and swallowed down bile.

Ridgedog had left him to die. _He had left him to die._ He hadn't come to save them, but set him up to die. Or had he? Xephos could believe many things about his god, but that was a stretch. Ridge was not a tame lion, but he wasn't a rabid one, either. He wouldn't. Could he? 

He'd asked Ridge once if the god could die, and Ridge had smiled mysteriously and said, "Dunno. Never tried." 

Not for the first time, he wondered what Ridge was.

He played back everything he could remember about the conversation in the gazebo, and the image of Ridge's stony face came up, overlaid with that fear he had felt in the vision. Was it fear for himself, or fear for us? _Either he won't come, or he can't come._ What if he was prevented from coming?

He felt sick. _I don't understand what's going on._

The dwarf was studying him anxiously, and he ruthlessly shoved all these thoughts aside. Act now, panic later. They were on their own now, that much was clear. 

He put on a smile he did not feel. If he lied to the dwarf, maybe he could lie to himself. "It's okay. Buddy, look at me. It's okay, I promise. I don't know what happened, but we will find out and get out of here, you and me, okay?" 

The dwarf sniffled, but seemed to take this at face value.

"Better. Now, help me out of this, would you?" With Honeydew's assistance, he got out of the coat and shirt, and the extent of the damage could be seen. His whole arm was ashen grey, the veins blackened and burned out under his skin. A corpse's arm, sewn to his living shoulder.

Honeydew looked stricken again, and Xephos reflexively lied, "It's okay. It's fine, I promise. I can fix it. I just need to get back to the lab." 

The dwarf gave him a little half-smile, but genuine for all that, and then produced a large handkerchief that might have been white at some point. As gentle as a nursemaid, he took Xephos' arm and slung it under his coat, and then helped him stand up. Xephos pulled himself to his full height. A little wobbly, but steady enough. With his good hand, he reached for the dwarf, who took it. 

"C'mon, friend." he said. "Let's go."

 


End file.
